The Science of Element Zero: A Mass Effect Discussion
by Church -Caboose- Shepard
Summary: Come and discuss and the debate the science behind a completely made up element and its properties.


**AN: **Well, I'll be damned. Who would have guessed that my discussion about alien genitalia and sex would have attracted so many views and reviews. It's like the internet is filled with horny pervs or something./p

I would like to thank those of you who posted reviews for the last Discussion. Some of you had rather good insight into the theory that I would have never considered. You honor me with your patronage.

"This time however, we're moving away from psychology (The God Child Discussion) and biology (The Asari Reproduction) and moving on to chemistry/physics! Oh I can hear your screams of joy now. Who doesn't like a good discussion about made up scientific properties and their relation to real life physics.

Today we shall be discussing the Science of Element Zero!  
It should be noted that I am neither a chemist nor a physicist. I am however a rather educated individual who has been doing quite a bit of research over the past month. But if I should make some mistake based on my facts, please feel free to tell me!

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Oh space travel, how I yearn for the. Though according to Einstein and that whole crap called "physics" I may never have my wish to travel the stars on a space pirate ship. At least now within a reasonable time.

Sadly this doesn't work for science fiction writings. So every universe has a way to scoot around the laws of physics in some plausible manner or another. In Halo they drop out of this Dimension, Star Trek they move time, in Aliens they just sleep, and in Star Wars they have space magic I think?

But for the game trilogy we all know in love, they have the mythical Element Zero. The stuff so strange and powerful, it can spawn an entire planet full of hot blue goddesses. There's also the whole, you know, ability to bend space and time in such a way that we can travel faster than light there by changing the way man looks at the cosmos.

But what exactly is element zero? Well according to the Mass Effect wiki it is a rare material that releases dark energy when subjugated to electrical currents. Ok, rare element huh? Well how rare is rare? Well it's common in the debris of neutron stars, so how rare are those? Well there are currently only about 2000 known neutron stars, so pretty rare. For a comparison there are at least 2 billion stars in the Milky way, 2 billion! Of course that's only the Neutrons we know of, but still, it's pretty freaking rare.

For those of you who don't know, a Neutron star is formed after a super massive star goes supernova at the end of its life. These neutron stars are only a few kilometers in size, but are much more denser than our own sun. Some have been discovered using radio waves of which some create. And these stars are like crazy weird. Aside from being super dense and yet so small, their cores are of an intense at about 10^11 Kelvin (For those who don't know, that's a lot). Back in the 60s, when some were first being discovered, some people thought the radio signals transmitting from these stars were either aliens or Russians. Cold war can make a man pretty crazy.

The energy required to create something so dense is obviously massive, that's why they only appear after super novas. But how does that relate to Element Zero? Well, in the Mass Effect Codex, element zero has an atomic number based off its picture, that number being 0. So this means that it is a real element, but has no protons, there for it also has no electrons. Theoretically, this thing could be as massive or tiny of an atom it wanted to be, because the only thing it would be made out of is neutrons. And believe it or not an element with only neutrons is theorized to exist, at the core of neutron stars!

Whoa a science fiction video game, with some actual science! That's why I love ya bioware! Though the element theorized to exist is called neutronium, the term was first coined way back in the 20s, for a form of matter made up of solely neutrons. The theorized element can not go on our normal representation of the periodic table, but it was used for circular versions of the table to represent a starting point. The neutronium is not actually recognized as an element though, but there have been reports of two or more neutrons forming bonds with no protons, which would be considered isotopes. There is the occasional free floating neutron, but none have been officially seen to bond to other neutrons. But I mean hey anything is possible, we haven't been able to see the inside of a neutron star. And it is theorized that neutronium could have a density 13 times that of the densest known ordinary object, something only possible in stars of an extreme density.

The best part about this, is how little we actually know. Any form of a neutronium isotope created quickly decayed in laboratories. So we don't know what type of properties it may have. And though we may find it difficult to create and keep stable here on earth, there's no reason to think that out there we are not able to physically observe and study, that there isn't a nice chunk of the stuff just floating around waiting to be found.

Now for the effects a neutronium like element may have in a physical sense. Well we know very little about how dark energy and its role in the universal laws of physics. The only thing we know is that dark energy and dark matter somehow changes the way gravity works, allowing the universe to expand instead of everything being attracted to everything else. So dark energy pushes things away despite gravity's influence? Sounds a lot like a singularity.

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And that's what I got for this round. I know somewhere there may be a fact wrong, but please feel free to tell me if I am, I'll go back and correct it. As always thank you all for reading , and please join the discussion and leave a review. If you have any suggestions for a new Mass Effect Discussion, please by all means share! I can't keep coming up with random topics by myself.

Thank you again for reading and supporting this series!


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